Table Of ContentDEPORTATION AND EXILE
Also by Keith Sword
THE FORMATION OF THE POLISH COMMUNITY
IN GREAT BRITAIN, 1939-50
{with N. Davies and J. Ciechanowski)
* THE SOVIET TAKEOVER OF THE POLISH
EASTERN PROVINCES, 1939-41 (editor)
THE TIMES GUIDE TO EASTERN EUROPE (editor)
* From the same publishers
Deportation and Exile
Poles in the Soviet Union, 1939-48
Keith Sword
Research Fellow
School of Slavonic and East European Studies
University of London
in association with
<x • J n / - , ., .'*, SCHOOL OF SLAVONIC AND
U C I UI vl V t: EAST EUROPEAN STUDIES
** M.^V.,,,!,^,, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
© Keith Sword 1994
Alt rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of
this publication may be made without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or
transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with
the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988,
or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying
issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court
Road, London W1T4LP.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this
publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil
claims for damages.
The author has asserted his right to be identified
as the author of this work in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Published by
PALCRAVE MACMILLAN
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010
Companies and representatives throughout the world
PALCRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave
Macmillan division of St. Martin's Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.
Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom
and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European
Union and other countries.
Outside North America
ISBN-13: 978-0-333-59376-9
ISBN-10: 0-333-59376-6
Inside North America
ISBN: 0-312-12397-3
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and
made from fully managed and sustained forest sources.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 94-31934
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne
Contents
List of Maps vi
Preface vii
Acknowledgements xii
List of Abbreviations xiii
1 The Mass Movement of Poles to the USSR,
1939-41 1
2 The Sikorski-Maisky Pact of 1941 and the
'Amnesty' for Poles Confined on Soviet Territory 28
3 The Evacuation of Poles from the USSR during 1942 60
4 The Relief Effort on Behalf of 'Amnestied' Poles 88
5 The Role of Polish Communists in the USSR,
1943-45 113
6 Renewed Deportations from Polish Territory,
1944-45 143
7 Repatriation from the Soviet Union, 1944-48 174
Notes 200
Select Bibliography 252
Index 259
List of Maps
3.1 Pahlevi, 1942 69
3.2 The Polish Army in the USSR and its
evacuation, 1941-42 82
5.1 The Polish Army in the USSR, 1943-44, and
its return to Poland 140
VI
Preface
This book is the result of work carried out under the aegis of the Polish
Migration Project at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies,
University of London. An earlier fruit of the Project's work was a
general study of the circumstances under which Poles travelled to Great
Britain following the outbreak of war in 1939, and the means by which
a large number were resettled in this country in the late 1940s.' In its
original conception the present volume was to provide a complemen-
tary study. It was to focus on one of the routes - perhaps the most
significant in terms of numbers and impact - by which Poles travelled
to Britain during the 1940s: forced deportation from homes in eastern
Poland to the Soviet Union and, thereafter, a trek which led via Persia,
the Middle East, Italy and, for some, East Africa.
The original plan for this volume changed due to a number of fac-
tors. The first arose from the question of where and when to end it.
Initially the evacuations of General Anders' troops to Iran in 1942
had seemed a logical point to draw the line. For many of the emigres,
whose memoirs I had read, their experiences in the Soviet Union cease
at this point. However, I later reflected increasingly on those who
had been left behind, following Anders' departure. If Polish Govern-
ment estimates of the period are to be believed, then less than 10 per
cent of the Poles deported from Eastern Poland by the Soviet auth-
orities in the period 1939-41 made their exit from Soviet territory in
1942. Even if some 20 per cent had fallen victim to starvation and
related diseases and were no longer alive in 1942, there would still
have been several hundred thousand Polish deportees remaining.
These reflections concentrated my attention on the gulf in historical
writing which developed in the postwar period. The field became div-
ided between the 'emigre' and the 'homeland' (communist) histories
of Poles in the Soviet Union during the 1940s. The emigre accounts
tended to dwell on the years 1939-43, dealing with the Soviet occu-
pation of Eastern Poland, the Katyn massacre, the mass deportations
from Polish territories and the fate of the deportees. This chapter of
events closed either with the evacuations of 1942 or, at a formal diplo-
matic level, with the break in Polish-Soviet relations in April 1943.
The 'communist' studies concentrated on the period 1943-47. They
glossed over many of the earlier events (without ignoring them
vii
viii Preface
completely) and concentrated on what they regard as the more posi-
tive aspects of Polish-Soviet relations - that is, between the Soviet
Government and Polish communists - after the 1943 break in diplo-
matic relations.
The period as a whole takes in the formation of two Polish armies on
Soviet soil and the mounting of two welfare initiatives for the needy,
uprooted, civilian Poles. However, in its historical writing, each politi-
cal camp has concentrated on one aspect of the period and tended to
play down the role of the other. My decision was therefore to attempt
to bridge this gulf and include chapters on the role of the Polish com-
munists in the USSR, including the repatriation process by which hun-
dreds of thousands of Poles moved west in the period 1944-48.
The second factor was the decision to include material on the thou-
sands of Polish underground activists and civilian personnel deported
by the Soviet security forces in 1944-45. Their story has, until re-
cently, been less well-known outside Poland and, even today, rela-
tively little is available on this episode which is not written in Polish.
The reasons for this are perhaps obvious; by contrast with the 1940
deportees, large numbers of whom made their way out of the USSR
in 1942 and were subsequently able to write about their experiences
for a wider audience, the voices of the 1944-45 deportees were sti-
fled. There was no general amnesty for them, no independent Polish
Government in Warsaw with the power to intervene on their behalf.
Those who were released from Soviet labour camps, and allowed to
return to their homeland, were still almost as effectively gagged in
communist Poland as they would have been had they remained on
Soviet territory.
As I read and researched, I became increasingly aware of the de-
gree of continuity between exile policies as they evolved under suc-
cessive Tsarist regimes and those of the Stalinist period. This became
evident from the repetitive nature of the 'Siberian Odyssey' experi-
ence that Poles underwent during the war years. Although the
deportations of the Stalinist years surpassed in size (numbers taken)
and in its horrors previous forced exile movements, Poles of previ-
ous generations had undergone similar experiences of involuntary
uprooting. Norman Davies has drawn attention to this pattern of
movement in his general history of Poland:
Each generation of Poles that was dumped in the tundra or the steppe
in 1832, 1864, 1906, 1940 or 1945 has talked of encountering Poles
of an earlier generation who had shared the same fate.2
Preface ix
This is something that almost every Pole knows, of course, since it is
not only a part of the nation's history, but also part of the history of
most Polish families.
By way of example, Jan Plater-Gajewski, spokesman for the Polish
community in Kazakhstan, explained during 1988, in an interview with
a Warsaw journalist, how four generations of his family had been
exiled by the Russian, and later Soviet, authorities:
Family fortunes were linked to the Polish Risings and the demo-
cratic movements. My great-grandfather was exiled to Siberia as a
result of the 1831 Rising; great-grandmother went with him and my
grandfather was born in Siberia. He (grandfather) returned several
years later to the family estate in Lithuania and became involved
with the 1863 Rising, as a result of which he was exiled to the
Yakutsk gubernia and from Vilnius, travelled there on foot and in
irons. He later returned to Poland - not to Lithuania, but to Podolia,
to the estates of my grandmother. Finally my father was sent to
Siberia for his participation in the democratic movement and col-
laboration in forming a Polish underground press at the turn of the
century. He was sent to Sotowka, from where he escaped and crossed
the Russian border into Austro-Hungary.
Plater-Gajewski himself was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and
returned to Poland only in 1924. From there he in turn was deported
by the Soviet authorities in 1939-40. Taken over the four generations
of the family, the total period each spent in Siberia was: great-grand-
father, seven years; grandfather, 11 years; father, five years; himself
(J.P-G), 17 years.3
An interest in this cyclical 'pattern' of exile, this rhythm of move-
ment to the east, prompted me to write an introductory chapter on
historical background. I thought it important that the reader should
understand something - however superficial it was to be in the space
available - of the traditions of the Tsarist exile system in which the
Stalinist deportation of whole classes and nationalities had its roots -
traditions from which past generations of Poles had suffered over
centuries.
Inevitably, perhaps, by extending the scope of the study in this way,
I accumulated too much material and was in the end forced to jetti-
son both this and other material. Consequently, I have limited the
attention devoted to the 'main waves' of 1939-41 deportees. For ex-
ample, I have left out a separate chapter on the exile experiences of
the 1940 deportees (in labour camps, 'special settlements' and state
